


If You Know These Streets Then These Streets Know You

by LayALioness



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Teachers, Here Comes The Boom AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-12 00:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7077136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy came home to find his sister watching another MMA fight on his TV, and he collapsed beside her on the couch.</p><p>“If you had to raise forty-three thousand dollars within the next twelve weeks, how would you do it?” he asked.</p><p>He was expecting something along the lines of 'put an ad out on Craigslist to see if anyone wants to hire an assassin,' but instead she said, “Easy. Amateur kickboxing.”</p><p>At the time, it just sounded so simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Know These Streets Then These Streets Know You

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: I'm checking to see if a "Here Comes the Boom" inspired fic where teacher Bellamy Blake starts doing MMA to save his schools music program which leads to him spending a lot of time with Nurse Griffin. If it doesn't exist, then I'd like to leave this as a prompt. (I also think Lincoln would be the guy to help train him/support him, Raven in his corner too). THANKS!

 

Bellamy doesn’t actually mean to get into mixed martial arts, it just sort of happens.

It starts because of Octavia, who ends up crashing on his couch at least once a month, since her roommate is apparently Satan in a turtleneck sweater. Along with the couch and the liquor cabinet, his sister also usually takes control of the television whenever she stays over, both because even if he did try to wrestle the remote away from her she’d win since she fights dirty, and because Bellamy doesn’t watch much TV anyway, so he doesn’t really mind. 

She’d recently begun an obsession with MMA fighting, which isn’t all that unusual. Octavia’s always had a love for violence--whether it was boxing, Tae Kwon Do, or just straight-up bar fights that ended with everyone in handcuffs. But the MMA is new, and honestly Bellamy’s a little surprised. It seems like there are too many rules involved, for Octavia to enjoy it.

But she does, and since Bellamy’s gotten used to doing his grading out in the living room, he finds himself getting sucked into it, too.

“These guys are really talented,” he says, over lunch in the teacher’s lounge one day. “Last night, one of them did this double spin kick that landed on the other guy’s jaw, and--”

“I really don’t care,” Murphy drawls around a mouthful of potato salad. “If I’m gonna watch two shirtless dudes roll around together, I’ll just watch porn, like a normal person.”

“It’s eleven AM and we’re already talking about porn?” Clarke asks, nabbing the closest empty chair and slipping in between them--which is sort of a feat, since the table itself is microscopic and meant for only one person. Even two was stretching it.

“I’m talking about porn,” Murphy corrects her. “Blake was talking about--I don’t even know.  _ Fight Club _ , or something.”

“MMA.” Bellamy rolls his eyes. Murphy likes to pretend he hates everything that’s even remotely popular, because he’s just fundamentally better than everyone else. Even though Bellamy knows for a fact that he likes musicals and collects those trashy Harlequin books sold at checkout counters in the supermarket. 

“Oh, cage fighting?” Clarke asks, with interest. Bellamy would be surprised, except Clarke Griffin seems to have at least a vague peripheral amount of interest in literally everything. She spends her off period making crayon art, and surfing through Wikipedia on her phone.

“Yeah, my sister got me into it. She’s started going to some fancy gym for boxers.”

“That’s cool,” Clarke offers. “Are you thinking of joining too?”

Bellamy starts laughing before he can really think about it. It’s just--he knows he’s in pretty good shape, because he coaches the track team and has always enjoyed running in a casual sort of way, but  _ cage fighting _ ? “No way.” He waves it off. “I’d be dead before I stepped foot on the mat.”

“Yeah, seriously,” Murphy agrees, and Bellamy scowls at him.

Clarke just shrugs, before they can get into a heated debate about whether or not Bellamy might actually be able to hold his own in the ring, or if he secretly has a glass jaw which no one knows about. “The Get Well Soon card for Raven is still in my office, by the way. I don’t know if either of you have signed it yet.”

“How’s the gear-head doing, anyway?” Murphy asks, because Murphy actively refuses to call Raven by her given name. Raven calls him  _ Snape  _ though, so it goes both ways.

“Better. She’ll have to have a year of physical therapy, to walk again, but at least her insurance from the school will pay for it.”

“That’s good,” Bellamy sighs. He’s been meaning to stop by the hospital, to visit, but hasn’t found time since the day after the accident. He’d feel like a shitty friend, if he didn’t know Raven’s been making the most of her stay there, chartering wheelchair fights in the halls. Why are all the women in his life so violent? Even Clarke can be deadly, when a game of Scrabble’s on the line.

“I’ll bring the card to the meeting tonight,” Clarke offers, and Bellamy only grimaces a little at the reminder. He  _ hates  _ faculty meetings. He does his best to avoid most of the staff members he doesn’t like, and he even usually gets away with it, but faculty meetings at Mt. Weather High tend to turn into gladiator fights if they aren’t careful. Forty-two grouchy teachers all stuffed in a room together, along with Mr. Wallace, the principal, whom nobody really likes.

It isn’t that he’s a bad person, at least as far as anyone knows, or even that he’s a bad boss--he’s just fundamentally  _ sleazy  _ in a way that Bellamy had previously assumed only Disney villains and men with handlebar mustaches could be.

“What do you think we’ll go to war over this time?” he asks, wry, as Murphy finishes the last of his lunch. He always eats the most out of all of them, and Bellamy honestly doesn’t know where he puts it all.

“Budget cuts, what else?” Clarke sighs, and the warning bell rings, signaling the start of third period will begin soon. 

“What do you wanna bet Cage tries to get rid of electives again?” Bellamy starts, grinning at the gleam in Clarke’s eye.

Murphy scoffs. “That’s not even a question; he  _ always  _ tries to get rid of electives.  _ I _ bet that this time, he tries to get rid of AP’s.”

Bellamy frowns. “But those only buoy the school’s overall test scores--it wouldn’t make sense, getting rid of them.”

“Since when has Cage Wallace ever made sense?” Clarke rolls her eyes. “Twenty bucks says he nominates AP American History as the first to go.” 

“History is a  _ core class _ ,” Bellamy argues, defensive. He’s been teaching both, AP American and European History classes, for close to five years now, and his kids get better each year. But that doesn’t seem to stop vice principal Cage Wallace, resident pain in the ass, from wanting Bellamy gone. 

“Oh, he’ll keep regular history,” Clarke assures him, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of comfort. She tries patting his shoulder, which is only a little better.

He may have spent the last four months trying to figure out a way to approach the fact that he’s half in love with Clarke Griffin, and would very much like to spend every night cooking her dinner or watching a movie and then putting his mouth on every inch of her body. They already do the dinner-and-movie thing pretty regularly, because neither of them really have very many other friends, but Bellamy hasn’t quite figured out how to mention the last part, yet.

Bellamy sighs, standing as the second warning bell rings. He has five minutes to get to his classroom on the third floor, before one of his Juniors decides to start the whole “if the teacher doesn’t show up in fifteen minutes, we’re allowed to leave!” thing. 

“Don’t forget about Raven’s card,” Clarke tells him on their way out, squeezing his wrist for good measure before starting off down the hall.

“Let me guess, you’re gonna just keep staring at her like  _ you want to drown in the ocean of her eyes _ , without actually saying how you feel.” Murphy smirks, and Bellamy shoves him in the shoulder.

“Shut up,” Bellamy says lamely, and he can still hear Murphy’s laugh echoing through the hall as he walks upstairs.

His free period finds Bellamy in Clarke’s office, laying out on the cot, with Clarke’s feet in his lap as he complains about the seniors who aren’t taking anything seriously, and she hums every now and again, to let him know she feels bad.

When Bellamy considers the situation objectively, he can admit that he probably does deserve to be made fun of. He’s got his crush’s feet in his lap, small and ice-cold as usual because Clarke has the worst blood circulation he’s ever seen, and her fingers in his hair, massaging his scalp in little circles to make him feel better--and he’s still too much of a coward to admit that he likes her as more than just friends. 

If anyone walked in on them right now, they’d probably assume they were seeing some weird form of foreplay. Bellamy groans.

“What?” Clarke asks, combing his hair back. She readjusts his glasses so they aren’t crooked on his nose, and Bellamy loves her. When he opens his eyes, she looks serious and concerned, her Official-School-Nurse-Look, and he grins.

“Nothing. Just not looking forward to having to watch Cage’s mouth move, without being allowed to hit it.”

“We could always corner him after school,” Clarke muses. “I have a baseball bat in my car.”

“You have a baseball bat in your  _ car _ ?”

She shrugs, purposefully vague. “I forgot to return it.”

The end of the day bell rings and they share a look, two soldiers about to walk into battle together. “Ready?” she asks.

Bellamy shakes his head. “I have bus duty.”

“I’ll save you a seat,” Clarke promises, and Bellamy walks out across the sun-heated pavement, so he can make sure none of the teenagers manage to get themselves hit by a car in the parking lot. It’s happened before, so it’s not exactly an irrational worry.

If he’s being honest, one of Bellamy’s favorite things is when the kids from his AP classes duck their heads and arms and sometimes whole torsos through the bus windows, to wave at him. He tries not to get a big head about it, but he’s been voted as Favorite Teacher for the school yearbook twice now, and he’s going for a third. It’s not that he’s easy, or concerned with being his students’ friends; he’s just found that it helps, to treat them like actual people capable of knowing things. 

Clarke does save him a seat, true to her word, and he slips into the cafeteria at the last minute, scooting her legs from the chair so he can sit down. 

Principal Wallace calls the meeting to order like he usually does, runs down the list of topic points they have to hit--namely, sports equipment for next year, that semester’s english class field trip to the local theater’s rendition of  _ Hamlet _ , and, as always, budget cuts.

“What about those AP study guides the school buys every year?” Cage asks immediately, because Cage doesn’t know how to  _ not  _ be a giant ass. Bellamy glares over at where he’s slinking around the edge of the group. Cage never seems to just walk or stand normally, he’s always slinking or lurking or looming or some other villainous adjective.

“I actually hate him,” he growls, and Clarke pats his knee, comfortingly.

Principal Wallace frowns. “Seeing as those AP scores are what’s keeping this school in the running for most scholarships earned in the county, I don’t see any problems with purchasing a few study guides,” he says, and Bellamy very nearly throws a victory punch in the air. “However,” Wallace continues, “The same cannot be said for such electives as musical theory, or automotive science, so those will be discontinued at the end of the semester.”

Clarke’s hand goes taut on Bellamy’s knee, and he feels his stomach drop down to his shoes. Jasper teaches musical theory, but only on the side since he’s also the chemistry teacher. But Raven’s run the auto shop class since before Bellamy was even hired. She started a robotics club with some of her more enthusiastic students. He can’t imagine her not tinkering with a carburetor down in the basement at any given time of day. And what about her insurance?

“You’re laying Raven off?” Bellamy asks, before he can think better of it. But even if he did, he’d still demand an answer. Wallace sighs, one of those full-body heavy ones he’s so good at. Usually it makes Bellamy feel sorry for him--he is ancient, after all, and probably constantly tired--but not today.

“Ms. Reyes is a phenomenal teacher,” he says, diplomatic as always. “I will be sure to include that in all letters of recommendations. I have no doubt that she will find a new job at a school more equipped to handle her class.”

Bellamy scoffs. “What, and that’s it? What about the union?” Normally, Bellamy hates the union and everything it stands for, because in his experience, it tends to put things like their summer holidays above the actual education of their students. But desperate times call for desperate measures. 

“I assure you, we live in a right to work state, and this is perfectly within my rights as the executive of this school,” Wallace says, grinding his false teeth a little. “The proper channels have all been notified.”

“Except for Raven,” Bellamy finishes for him, and Clarke lays a hand on his shoulder, to calm him down.

“What if the auto shop raises funds on its own?” she wonders, and Bellamy loves her, because this is always what they do; one of them gets fired up and outraged, and then the other steps up to level things out, keeping their head straight. Usually Bellamy’s the one getting angry, but on more than one occasion he’s had to quite literally  _ carry  _ a yelling Clarke out of the bar, before she started a brawl. “And the robotics club could help,” she adds. Wallace gives another of his patented sighs.

“I’m afraid there just isn’t the time for that,” he says, and even manages to sound a little sorry about it. Bellamy’s never hated Principal Wallace, not like he hates his son, but his opinion of the older man is very quickly dropping. “The number is just too large.”

“How high can it be?” Bellamy snorts. “It’s not like Auto Shop takes a lot of up-keep. Raven gets most of the scrap metal and car parts they use from the town dump.”

Wallace levels him with a heavy look. “Forty-three thousand dollars,” he says, and Murphy lets out a low whistle. 

Cage is grinning wickedly in his seat, and Bellamy isn’t convinced that he’s not at fault, here. Cage Wallace could probably be tied to most of the horrible things in the universe, at least in a Six Degrees From Kevin Bacon sort of way. He probably had at least something to do with global warming, and maybe even the most recent outbreak of Mad Cow.

“Raven just got hit by a car,” Bellamy snaps, fuming. “She won’t be able to walk again for a year, if ever, and you’re just going to take her benefits away, just like that?”

“She should be able to file a claim for unemployment,” Wallace says, and yeah, Bellamy definitely hates him now.

“I should be able to file my fist in your jaw,” Bellamy mutters, low so only Clarke can hear it. She rolls her eyes at him.

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“I,” Bellamy starts, but then someone kicks the back legs of his chair, and he turns to find Murphy scowling at him.

“Put a cork in it, Blake,” he hisses, and Wallace continues on with the meeting. “Unless you want to lose those study guides of yours.”

“Since when do you care?” Bellamy hisses back, and Clarke glares at the both of them.

Murphy rolls his eyes. “Since I know if you and Reyes leave, I’ll be stuck alone with Griffin and the wonder twins.” He’s referring to Monty and Jasper, the biology and chem teachers, respectively, who are staying uncharacteristically quiet in their seats because just a few weeks ago Wallace found out they’d been using some of the chemistry equipment to make their own moonshine, after hours, and they don’t want to give him another reason to lecture them.

“Miller would be here,” Bellamy offers, and Murphy makes a face like he knew he would. It’s no secret that Murphy has some sort of blood feud going with the English teacher, even if no one knows the exact specifics. Clarke’s convinced they have some sort of romance-gone-bad history, and Bellamy’s slowly begun to agree.

The meeting finishes without Bellamy realizing it, too busy stewing over Raven. He only gets up because Clarke prods him in the shoulder, and he follows her out to the faculty parking lot, because they carpool. Lexa and Roan are waiting for them by Roan’s truck, an enormous F-150 that, if it belonged to anyone else, Bellamy would immediately assume it was part of some Napoleon Complex. But since he knows Roan, he also knows Roan just likes really big trucks. There’s a veritable mountain of gym equipment in the pickup’s bed, broken hockey sticks that need to be duct taped, and mesh bags that need to be patched up. 

Lexa curls her lip up in distaste as she hauls herself up into the front seat, having called shotgun beforehand. Lexa prefers small, sleek cars that are very fast and resemble bullets. She’s also the worst driver Bellamy has ever known; every time they pile into her tiny silver jag, he comes to terms with the fact that there’s a very good chance he might die.

“So I heard Reyes is getting canned,” Roan says, in way of small talk. The local country station plays on low. Bellamy’s fairly sure Roan doesn’t even like country music, and only ever plays it because he knows it will annoy them. 

Beside him in the backseat, Clarke scowls. Roan is the only person Bellamy knows who riles Clarke up as much as he does, except with Roan it’s less like a boy pulling her pigtails, and more like a brother turning the hot water off in the middle of her shower. “Yeah, we were all at the same meeting.”

“So what are you two planning to do about it?” Lexa asks, rolling her eyes when Bellamy and Clarke share a surprised glance. “We all know you aren’t about to let her lose her job,” she says, impatient. 

Bellamy still isn’t totally sure what Lexa teaches, other than the fact that it’s sort of like home economics, except a lot more violent. He knows they made dip-dyed candles the other day, but the day before that, her students were covered in bruises and just sort of shrugged when he asked about them.  _ We’re learning how to lead an empire _ , Aden tried to explain, which wasn’t helpful at all.

“Fundraiser?” Clarke tries, looking at Bellamy. He nods, because, even if they have to raise over forty thousand dollars by the end of the semester--what else can they do? Short of robbing a bank, which he honestly is sort of contemplating.

“Fundraiser,” he agrees.

“Excellent,” Lexa says, turning back towards the road. “I’ll have my class make some more candles, for you to sell.”

“I thought you didn’t like Reyes,” Bellamy says, a little wary. He likes Lexa, as much as he can, while knowing really nothing about her other than the fact that she really likes candles, she hates modern technology, and she dated Clarke for a while, back when she was still new. But Lexa can be a difficult pill to swallow; she doesn’t care for other people, and she can be brusque in a way that comes off as heartless. She and Raven have never gotten along.

“I don’t,” she says, simple as usual. “But you do, and Clarke does, and I like both of you.” She turns her nose up at Roan. “I don’t like you, at all.”

Roan grins as he pulls up to Lexa’s condo. “Likewise.”

He drives Bellamy and Clarke to the central hospital, where Raven is, without even being asked. It’s times like these where Bellamy thinks he might actually grow to like Roan, eventually, the way he has with Lexa.

But then Roan smirks and says “Tell her good luck with the classifieds,” and Bellamy thinks he probably won’t.

“Are you going to tell her, or should I?” Clarke asks, looking suddenly exhausted, like all the fight’s leaked out of her. Bellamy gently takes the card from her hands.

“I’ll do it,” he says, and lets her lean against him as they walk towards Raven’s room.

She takes it very well, all things considered. She stays mostly quiet while they explain what happened. Honestly, Bellamy was expecting a lot more crutch-swinging and swearing in general. 

But instead she just says, “Guess I’d better buy a newspaper and start searching through the classifieds.” She’s joking, but Bellamy knows her, and he knows she’s not okay. Even with the mess of her insurance set aside, Raven loves her job, and she loves her kids. He can’t imagine her giving it up.

“We’re going to do fundraisers,” Clarke blurts, because she always goes high pitched when she’s upset. “A hundred fundraisers, if we have to.”

“Yeah,” Bellamy says, swallowing as Raven plays with the balloon bouquet that Luna left her. He knows Raven’s been trying to ask the guidance counselor out on a date, for a while now. “Everything will be fine.”

 

Everything is not fine.

“I just would really like the record to show that this was my last option,” Bellamy says, as he lets Octavia unwrap and rewrap his gloves for the third time, glaring at his hands like they’re refusing to cooperate. He knows it’s just because she’s scared. 

“That’s not true,” Clarke chirps from where she’s sitting on a splintering bar stool. One of its legs has been gnawed at by something, so it keeps tipping from side to side whenever she moves, and he’s worried she’ll fall over. “You could always prostitute yourself.”

“I would look really good in Julia Roberts’ boots,” Bellamy agrees, wincing when Octavia pinches his skin a little.

“Remember to keep your arms up,” she tells him, practically spitting, because whenever his sister feels scared she likes to mask it with anger. “And keep your solar plexus covered, you suck at that.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, O,” he says, tugging her in one last time, clinging a little. “Wish me luck?” It’s something they used to do as kids--Octavia would be worried about a math test, or a soccer game, and ask for good luck, and Bellamy would always respond the same way.

“You’re a Blake,” Octavia says, wry. “Blake’s don’t need luck.”

Bellamy grins and lets her go, following Lincoln outside.

“Don’t worry,” Lincoln tells him, walking him towards the ring. Or rather, the lot behind the little gas station, that’s acting as the ring. The fight itself is  _ technically  _ legal; it’s the betting that isn’t. To be honest, Bellamy thought fights like this one, in abandoned warehouses and parking garages and gas station lots, weren’t actually real. He thought they were some Hollywood myth started by movies like _ Fight Club _ . 

“You’ll do fine,” Lincoln continues, playing the part of the faithful coach effortlessly. “It’s your first match; there’s no shame in losing.”

“Oh, I know I’m going to lose,” Bellamy snorts. “It’s the surviving part I’m not sure about.”

“Just keep your arms up.” Lincoln shrugs, which seems to be the go-to shred of advice that Bellamy keeps getting. “And don’t hit below the belt; that’s when the fights get nasty.”

“Got it,” Bellamy says, stepping through the crowd. But then he sees his opponent, six and a half feet of pale bulky muscle, long dark hair pulled back, a long beard just revealing his deep scowl, brown skin covered in tattoos. 

Bellamy feels every bit of the last three weeks of training, just tip and fall right out of his head. He is going to die.

Honestly, he maybe should reconsider the prostitution idea.

 

The thing is--they did try fundraising. For the first two weeks, all they did was fundraise--car washes and bake sales and selling the candles made by Lexa’s class. The robotics club put together a few robot fight matches, which got a decent amount of income and were actually really cool, but it still wasn’t enough. By the end of the second week, they still weren’t even at one thousand dollars, let alone forty-three.

Bellamy came home to find his sister watching another MMA fight on his TV, and he collapsed beside her on the couch.

“If you had to raise forty-three thousand dollars within the next twelve weeks, how would you do it?” he asked.

He was expecting something along the lines of  _ put an ad out on Craigslist to see if anyone wants to hire an assassin _ , but instead she said, “Easy. Amateur kickboxing.”

At the time, it just sounded so simple. 

Clarke just gave him an incredulous look when he brought it up to her the next day. They were in her office and speaking lowly, because a kid was asleep on her cot with an ear ache--which they knew was just code for I have a test I didn’t study for, but Clarke was feeling especially charitable that day and it wasn’t like Bellamy was about to stop her.

“You’re going to try boxing,” she said.

“Kickboxing,” Bellamy corrected. “MMA, basically. Just small time stuff, but yeah. I think I can do it.”

“Have you ever fought anyone before?”

“Outside of school bullies and a few bar fights? No.” He shrugged. “But how hard can it be? Octavia said even the losers take away a couple grand for each fight, and she’s going to hook me up with her personal gym trainer, who used to be semi-professional before he hurt his knee.”

Clarke just stared at him. “You’re going to learn to fight  _ from someone who got hurt in a fight _ ?”

Bellamy shrugged again. “O said he’s still good.” Honestly he was a little offended that she clearly didn’t believe he could hold his own in the ring. She’d definitely seen him without a shirt before, at the car washes. He’d caught her checking him out. She knew he was in good shape, so he wasn’t really sure why she was doubting him.

Other than the fact that he’d admitted himself just two weeks ago that he would probably die in a cage fight.

“I’m coming with you,” she declared. “To the matches. You’ll probably get concussed or something, and ambulances take forever, and cost a lot of money, so.”

Bellamy grinned. “You’re saying you want to be my personal nurse?”

“Medic,” Clarke sniffed. “I’ll be your personal medic. But only because I’m worried they might break your face.”

“Yeah, we can’t have that.”

Clarke ducked her head, but it didn’t matter; he still knew she was smiling. “It would be tragic,” she agreed. “Your face is definitely your best feature.”

Lincoln, the trainer that Octavia introduced him to that afternoon, was everything Bellamy expected from a semi-professional MMA fighter, but young. In fact he was roughly Bellamy’s age, and seemed amused when Bellamy said so.

“What were you anticipating?”

“I don’t know,” Bellamy admitted. “More--Clint Eastwood, I guess? Morgan Freeman? Sly Stallone?”

Lincoln just shook his head. “This isn’t the movies,” he warned. “There won’t be some sort of exercise montage, and then suddenly you’re fight-ready.”

“If this was a movie, I’d have the forty-three grand by now,” Bellamy agreed, and then proceeded to get the shit beaten out of him for the next two hours.

“Same time tomorrow?” Lincoln asked, as Bellamy fell to his knees on the mat, trying to catch his breath. When he glanced up, he saw there wasn’t a single bead of sweat on Lincoln’s skin, which didn’t seem at all fair. Bellamy felt like his lungs were collapsing, and he was going to die right there on a rubber mat that smelled like feet.

“Sure,” he gasped out, and then waited for Octavia to show up and peel him off the floor.

“Please tell me you aren’t dating him,” he whined, as she pulled him up over her shoulder. As soon as he saw Lincoln, Bellamy knew he was his sister’s exact type. Octavia ignored the question until she got him outside. She didn’t even make a face about how much he smelled.

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” she said primly, and he groaned.

Clarke went with him the next day and sat on the rusted metal bleachers across the gym, to watch them. When Lincoln announced a water break, Bellamy jogged over to her. 

“How can you have the arms you do, and be so bad at this?” she teased, and he shrugged his least sore shoulder.

“All I’m getting from that is that you think I have nice arms.” He grinned, grinning wider when she flushed a light pink. “I normally just do weights training. I don’t usually have things swinging towards my face.”

“Which is why it’s so pretty,” Clarke mused, and Bellamy managed to convince himself a while ago that whatever he and Clarke had, it probably wasn’t romantic, but now he wasn’t so sure. She’d been giving him a lot of lines lately and it was getting hard to not read between them.

Lincoln barked for him to get back in the ring, and Clarke flashed him one last bright smile, before he went. He was definitely going to ask her out, after all of this was over, and Raven’s position was safe. When things calmed down, and they could breathe a little bit. Then, he’d ask.

Octavia was being nicer to him too, although he knew that probably had less to do with him and more to do with the behemoth she was dating. Bellamy liked Lincoln, he did, but there was always going to be that underlying layer of wariness that he held with anyone his sister dated. The knowledge that they might hurt her and that if they did, Bellamy wouldn’t hesitate to break them in half.

Even if they were bigger than him, and a trained fighter, and covered in the kind of tattoos that remind him of giant snakes that crush their prey to death and then swallow them whole.

When he said as much to Clarke, she laughed at him. “How would you manage to beat him?”

“It’s a big brother superpower,” Bellamy explained. “You know how sometimes moms can lift whole minivans off their kids, because of adrenaline? It’s like that.”

“Well why can’t you do that in the ring?” Clarke asked, genuine. From across the break room, Murphy scoffed like he always did whenever they mentioned Bellamy’s new pastime. 

Bellamy just shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. It’s like a primal instinct that only kicks in when Octavia’s in trouble, or hurt, or something.”

Clarke hummed around her spoonful of yogurt. There was a smudge of pink strawberry at the corner of her mouth, that Bellamy wanted to brush off with his tongue and then taste. “What if you imagined she was in trouble? Or, like, one of the kids, or something.”

“I don’t know.” Bellamy frowned. “Maybe.”

He tried it out with Lincoln that evening, imagined that Lincoln had broken Octavia’s heart, or kidnapped Aden for ransom, or something. For the first time, he managed to actually land a hit, a right hook straight into Lincoln’s jaw.

“Shit,” Bellamy swore, when Lincoln stumbled back and raised a hand to his mouth. But his trainer just smiled.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Never be sorry for a good, clean hit.” He rolled his shoulders back, and widened his stance. “Now let’s see if you can do that again.”

He couldn’t, obviously, and Lincoln laid him out on his back again soon enough, but by the end of their session, a purple bruise was blooming on Lincoln’s face, like a flower. Octavia studied it with a frown when she arrived, and then crossed over to where Bellamy was stuffing his gloves into his duffel bag. She punched him in the arm, but it barely made him flinch so he knew she was only using forty-five percent power.

“What the fuck,” he said, mild.

“That’s for hitting my boyfriend.” She shrugged, and then bumped his fist with a grin. “And that’s also for hitting my boyfriend.”

Bellamy shook his head at her, but he grinned the whole walk home.

After three weeks of training, Lincoln said, “I got you a match.”

“What?” Bellamy asked, surprised. He hadn’t forgotten--the whole reason he’d started training with Lincoln was so he could hold his own in a real fight, after all--but he’d gotten used to a certain routine, and now he was thrown off a little.

“A match,” Lincoln repeated. “A friend of mine called up looking for a last-minute replacement fighter. You’re ready.”

It was a lie and Bellamy knew it; he could still only barely hold his own against Lincoln, and he had yet to actually win a sparring match. But he wasn’t going into these fights expecting to win, anyway, and even with the continuous baking and candle sales, they still weren’t anywhere close to their goal. It was time for him to take the plan to its next step, which meant he had to actually fight someone who wasn’t Lincoln.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Let me know where and when.” Lincoln clapped his back, like a proud father, which was again, weird, since they were nearly the same age.

The fight was on a Sunday night, which seemed odd and unfair, since Bellamy would have to work on Monday and he honestly wasn’t sure if he’d be able to move by then. He was used to laying out on the couch covered in bags of frozen vegetables, after sparring with Lincoln. He wasn’t sure what an actual fight might do to him. 

Clarke offered to drive them all there, because of the three of them, Octavia and Lincoln only had their bikes, and Bellamy’s truck was a two-seater. At least Clarke’s four door had a backseat that he could sprawl out in like a dog, once the match was over.

“Try not to die,” Clarke said, following him into the gas station bathroom, so he could get ready. It was everything he expected from a seedy black market boxing match; flickering fluorescent lights, the buzzing of flies everywhere, a ring of some mysterious sludge around the sink and toilet drains, blood staining the porcelain, a spiderweb of cracks in the mirror’s face, reflecting a dozen shards of Bellamy back at him, a broken bar stool for some unknown reason, resting in the corner. Octavia unwrapped and rewrapped his hands three times before he finally pulled them back. 

“I’ll do my best,” he grinned back at her, but she wasn’t smiling. She was scared. He just reached over to tug her hair, once, before letting Lincoln lead him away.

 

Bellamy doesn’t remember the match, not really. It moves too quickly for his mind to fully document all the details, just catching flashes here and there. An uppercut, a knee digging into his ribs, the heel of his foot against the man’s stomach, the feel of bone crunching under his fist, the gush of coppery blood that flows out and hits him in the eyes and mouth, the heavy pain of breathing through the pain in his chest. 

By the time it’s all over, Bellamy still isn’t really sure what happened, or who won. He’s lying on the pavement, the skin of his cheek scraped off like a skid mark. The other man stands victoriously, but only just, still bleeding from his nose, red dripping between his fingers.

“You almost beat him,” Octavia says, a little awed in spite of herself. “Bell, you almost won.”

Lincoln and Clarke look just as impressed, even as Clarke lectures him about gravel getting stuck in his wounds. She tugs him back into the bathroom and makes him sit on the stool, tipping his head back under the sink so she can rinse the grit and blood away, and check if he needs any stitches. 

Her fingers are impossibly soft, running through his hair with the water. “You were good,” she offers, and he grins, but it’s made a little messy by the split in his upper lip.

“Clarke,” he starts, hissing when she brushes a particularly stinging cut.

“Sorry,” she whispers, and he catches her wrist, bringing her hand to his mouth. He hears her breath catch, and she grazes a knuckle against his injured lip. The salt from her skin mixes with the blood in his mouth. Her voice is a little shaky. “Bellamy, I--”

“Five grand, bitches!” Octavia whoops, crashing in through the unlocked door. Clarke snatches her hand back like Bellamy’s on fire, and his sister gives them a funny look.

Bellamy struggles up, and Clarke lunges over again, to help him. “I thought the losing party only got two?”

“Apparently not,” O shrugs, tossing the padded envelope into his lap, landing heavy on this thigh. 

Bellamy turns to share a victory grin with Clarke. “Just nine more fights to go,” he says, and Clarke shakes her head at him.

“Don’t say that until I forget how much I hated watching the first one.” She still hasn’t taken her hands off him.

 

Lexa picks them all up in the morning, with Roan already stuffed and uncomfortable-looking in the backseat, probably muscled back there by Lexa herself. She ducks her head through the window, eyes running over Bellamy from over the rim of her sunglasses. “I thought you might need more room,” she explains. “I assumed all of your bones would be broken.”

“Then I probably would have just called a sub,” Bellamy says, bemused. He’d done his best to dress so most of the bruising was covered, but there isn’t much he can do about the cuts on his face, and the light bruising around his left eye.

“What are you planning to tell your students?” Roan asks, looking begrudgingly impressed. Bellamy isn’t surprised the gym teacher knows; he’d told Miller when he first came up with the idea, and everyone knows Miller’s a gossip.

“The same thing I’m planning to tell everyone else.” Bellamy shrugs. “I walked into a door.”

Roan snorts, but doesn’t argue, and Lexa races off towards the duplex Clarke shares with an elderly gay couple that likes to invite her over sometimes for brunch, and talk about Stonewall. Bellamy likes them because they like to chat about history. Clarke likes them because they make really good scones.

She leans over to check his face, when she slides into the car. Once she’s satisfied, she sits back with a huff. “Still planning to use the fell down the stairs excuse?”

“Jesus, that’s even worse,” Roan says, and Clarke flicks him in the ear.

“Maybe I’ll just threaten to fail them if they ask about it,” Bellamy muses, and catches Lexa’s grin in the mirror. She’s always a fan of a plan that involves blackmail.

He’s only ten minutes into his first class of the day, when the whispering and note-passing becomes too much, and he sighs, turns back from the white board, and says, “Go on, ask me.”

There’s a pause and then Zoe, one of his favorites, raises her hand. He nods, and she asks, “Did--did someone attack you, or something?”

It’s clearly coming from a place of concern, and Bellamy feels a rush of affection for his students. “No, nothing like that, don’t worry.”

“Then what happened?” asks Sterling, and Bellamy shoots him a wry grin.

“I walked into a door.” The class laughs, like he knew they would, and he turns back to the board, marker in hand. “Now, enough worrying about my face; let’s get back to Prussia.”

Bellamy doesn’t mean to start winning fights, just like he didn’t mean to get sucked into mixed martial arts to begin with.

“You don’t just trip and stumble into a pair of boxing gloves and a ring,” Clarke says, when he tells her, icing his knee with a bag of frozen sugar snap peas.

“No, but--” Bellamy isn’t really sure how to explain what it feels like, when he’s fighting. The only way he can explain it to himself, is with a memory of a birthday party that he went to when he was nine.

It was for a classmate at school; he’d invited the whole grade, and his mom picked them up in a minivan with wood panels. Octavia was young enough that she couldn’t come with them, and Bellamy was a little preoccupied, worrying about leaving her alone with his mom. 

The party was at a lake--there were picnic tables and hot dogs and balloons and presents, and everyone was in the water except for him. Bellamy didn’t know how to swim, but he didn’t want to admit it, so he let himself be goaded across the field, where some of the older kids were using a long rope to jump into the deeper water. Bellamy held onto the rope so hard he got burns on his palms that stung when he landed in the salty lake, and for a minute he held his breath and everything was peaceful.

For that one minute, he forgot about Octavia and his mom and everything else, and just existed, suspended in the murky water. 

Then that minute passed, and Bellamy could feel his chest burning from lack of air, and he felt the seaweed tangle up in his legs, and he panicked, fighting his way towards the surface where he could still just barely see the sun, even though his eyes were stinging. He thrashed and thrashed and just when his limbs grew too tired to move, and his eyes started drooping and his vision went blurry, he felt a pair of hands grip him by the arms and haul him up out of the lake. 

That’s what it feels like, when he’s fighting. Like he’s breaking the surface and gulping in air. And sometimes, when his vision clears, he sees the other man on the floor, and Bellamy’s still standing upright.

But he doesn’t know how to say any of that, so he just shakes his head. “It’s less like an accident, and more like--not the outcome I expect.”

“Well, I expect it.” Clarke shrugs, easy, and Bellamy watches her frown at the shot records she’s going through, in preparation for next semester’s immunizations. “You’re a fighter, Bellamy Blake. Even if you don’t think so.”

Bellamy assumes that’s the end of the rumors about him at school, but then somebody tapes a match, held in the belly of a car garage, on their cell phone and puts it on the internet.

He arrives at school the next day to find most of his class huddled around Harper’s tablet, watching the fight. When he walks into the room, they erupt into cheers and prattling questions, how long he’s been fighting, what he’s fighting for, if he’s in an actual fight club, if he knows anyone from the mob, if he has gambling debts, and so on. 

Bellamy manages to get the class in order enough for him to get through the lesson, and then finds refuge in Clarke’s office for his free period.

“I hate modern technology,” he whines, sprawling out on her cot and throwing an arm over his eyes, still bruised and sensitive from the blows he took the night before. Clarke clicks her tongue and feeds him two aspirin. 

“Luddite,” she says, all affection. He really should do something about the fondness in her eyes. 

Someone ends up forwarding the video to Raven, recently discharged from the hospital but still bedridden at her apartment. Apparently she’s had Luna looking after her though, all a part of her nine-step plan of seduction, so she hasn’t been complaining.

“I can’t believe you’re letting a bunch of meatheads beat you up for money,” she says, when Bellamy shows up with flowers.

The flowers are a cover story, if he’s being honest. But Raven knows that already, he can tell.

“Holy shit,” she says. “You and Clarke are fucking.”

Bellamy scowls at her. “We are not,” he snaps, but she just smirks at him.

“I can’t tell if you’re mad at me for bringing it up, or mad because I’m wrong.”

“I’m not here to talk about Clarke,” he lies and she snorts, which he deserves.

“All we ever do is talk about Clarke,” she points out. “We used to also talk about Luna, but then I got my shit together and grew some balls.” She pauses and then adds, “Figuratively speaking.”

Bellamy frowns. “Let me guess, it’s time for me to do the same?”

“We both know you already have the balls, Blake,” Raven sighs, exasperated. “It’s time for you to use them!” She throws her head back against the pillow. She’s surrounded by pillows in her bed. Bellamy’s a little worried that if she’s not careful, she’ll be smothered by them. “Clarke only ever talks about you too, you know,” she says. “It’s obnoxious. Maybe if you two would finally get together, I’d get my best friends back, and you could be stupid about each other  _ with each other _ .”

“I know,” Bellamy agrees, and bites back a laugh when it shocks Raven so much she shoots upright, grimacing a little when it displaces her bad leg. “I’m planning to ask her out, after this last fight.”

“Idiot,” Raven grumbles, but it’s ruined by her grin. “It’s about damn time. When is it? I want to be there.”

“Next week,” Bellamy says, eyeing her bad leg, and Raven scowls.

“I can make it,” she tells him, and he believes her. 

He gets Roan to drive them, because they can put Raven’s wheelchair in the truck bed, and because Roan still owes him from when Bellamy subbed for him the other week, while Roan dealt with a certain infection he didn’t want to discuss.

Clarke comes too, as usual, and this time it’s at an actual arena, with a ring like the one at Lincoln’s gym. 

He’s fighting against someone called Tristan, except everyone calls him Goliath, and Bellamy tries not to feel a little jealous. 

“You could be Bellamy the Beauty,” Roan suggests. “Baby-Face Blake.” He pats Bellamy’s cheek with a smirk.

“Shouldn’t you be buying concessions or something,” Bellamy grumbles, making his way towards the ring.

The referee--because they have a  _ referee  _ this time, instead of just a guy who makes sure no one calls the cops on them--pulls him aside. “Who’s going in your corner?” he asks, and Bellamy stares at him dumbly.

“What?”

“Your corner,” the man repeats, impatient, and Bellamy glances over to find Goliath chatting with two other men across the way.

“Oh, uh,” Bellamy looks back and points through the crowd. “Those two,” he says, waving Lincoln and Octavia over. Clarke forces her way with them, because of course she does, but she’s stopped by the ref.

“Who are you?” he asks, and she narrows her eyes at him.

“I’m his medic,” she says, shouting to be heard over the sounds of the crowd. Bellamy bites the inside of his cheek, to keep his grin in check. It’s just--she always looks like a cat when she’s angry, puffing herself up to look bigger than she is.

“His medic?” the ref asks, and Clarke shakes his hand off her shoulder.

“What, Goliath doesn’t have one?” she asks, nothing but innocent, and Bellamy pulls her in.

“It’s okay, she’s part of my corner too,” he tells him.

The referee just shakes his head at the lot of them. “Fifteen till first round,” he tells them, and hops off to head over to the judges table. The whole thing’s official enough to make Bellamy’s skin itch. He’s been getting used to the back lot fights, in shitty weather conditions, with grimy changing rooms and a crowd of guys in hooded sweatshirts, standing around.

He sees a girl in a shiny pink bikini walk by holding a beach ball with the number ONE painted on it, like the kind on televised fights, and Bellamy feels like his nerves are all on fire.

“Hey.” Clarke reaches up to put her hands on either side of his face, smoothing the hair from his eyes, and all at once, Bellamy can breathe again. “You’re going to be fine,” she says, and Bellamy believes her. Clarke Griffin is personally promising to fist fight the universe, if anything happens to him, and he doesn’t doubt that she would. 

Bellamy traces his arms, until his hands frame her own. He watches her eyes flicker to his mouth, and he very seriously thinks about kissing her. He’s suddenly sure she would kiss him back.

But Lincoln was right, all those weeks ago; this isn’t a movie, and he doesn’t want to be the guy that just kisses the girl and expects everything to fall into place afterward. He needs to talk to her, to tell her he’s in love with her, to let her know that he wants so much more than just a good luck kiss before he goes into a fight.

Octavia squirms her way in between them with uncanny timing. “Save it for after the match,” she yells at them both, and then turns a glare on her brother. “Get your head in the game, Bell. This guy isn’t just in it for the cash, he’s a rising middleweight champ and wants to take it to the big leagues. He’ll go harder than anyone you’ve ever fought.”

“Since when are you my coach?” Bellamy teases and Octavia bristles.

“I’ve  _ always  _ been your coach!”

“Then why am I paying Lincoln and not you?”

“Because I believe in charity,” O sniffs, inspecting his gloves for any loose laces. She doesn’t find any, of course, but she still doesn’t let go of his hands.

“Hey.” Bellamy smiles. “I’ll be okay, seriously. Lincoln’s a good teacher.”

“He’s the best,” Octavia agrees, firm, and then hugs him so hard her toes come off the floor, like when she was little and used to beg him to spin her around in circles until they both nearly threw up. He has no idea why that was her favorite game, as a kid, but it was, and Bellamy was always a sucker when it came to his sister.

“FIVE MINUTES TO FIRST ROUND,” a voice booms through the speaker system, and Bellamy sets her back down on her feet, pressing a kiss to her hair.

“Wish me good luck?” He grins.

“Blake’s don’t need luck.” Octavia grins back, and folds herself through the ropes, to stand with Lincoln and Clarke on the sidelines. Bellamy catches each of their eye, and then turns to try and find Raven and Roan wherever they are in the crowd--and that’s when he sees them, filing in through the auditorium doors, stepping up into the bleachers in single-file.

He sees Lexa, Miller, Jasper and Monty first, and even Murphy near the tail end--but the real surprises are the smaller figures with them--Zoe and Sterling and Fox and his entire senior class, plus some of the kids from Raven’s robotics club. They’re all wearing matching shirts, like homemade football jerseys, that say BLAKE on the back, with the number one. On the front there’s what looks like the letter Omega, and Bellamy ducks his head a little, so they won’t see him cry.

He glances over at Clarke, to find her smiling wider than he’s ever seen, because of course she had something to do with this. Bellamy and Clarke have always had a strange sort of telepathy, where they can each usually tell what the other is thinking, and Bellamy hopes she can read his thoughts now.

Because while he’d been content with the thought of losing and collecting his stack of five thousand, now he’s thinking he might actually try to win.

He sees Clarke’s brow raise just a little.  _ Of course you will _ . Bellamy grins, and turns back to the fight. 

His kids have started stomping their feet and clapping, chanting  _ Mis-ter-Blake! Mis-ter-Blake!  _ over and over in the stands, and he shoots them a wave. He’s not really sure how comfortable he is, with them seeing him shirtless, beating another man and getting beaten in turn, but. They’re here now, and he’s not about to let them watch him go down without giving the match everything he’s got. He’s still a teacher, after all. Plus there’s a matter of pride at hand. 

Bellamy likes to think he’s not  _ too  _ vain, but he really doesn’t want to lose in front of his kids.

The referee calls him and Tristan over to the center of the mat. They bump gloves. The first bell rings. Tristan swings first, but Bellamy lands a blow to his ribs. The crowd starts screaming, and Bellamy goes under the waves.

When he comes back, the bell is ringing, signaling the first five-minute break, and Bellamy’s still standing. His head is pounding from one too many blows, but his fists hurt too, which means he must have landed a few of his own. He jogs over to the corner of the ring, where Lincoln, Octavia and Clarke are standing just below the platform, waiting.

Clarke passes up the Nalgene bottle of water, and Lincoln offers a few snippets of advice-- _ keep your arms up, Tristan’s left side is weaker, use your speed not your strength, fight like you mean it _ \--before the warning bell rings and Bellamy puts his mouth guard in again and heads back underwater.

The kids are still cheering his name, albeit with less coordination, but he can hear them more clearly than anyone over the din of the room. A fifteen-year-old’s shriek can go a long way. 

They’re obviously irritating Tristan, who keeps shooting them sharp glares, and Bellamy sends them a sly thumbs up, so they’ll keep up the good work.

Tristan is obviously a good fighter, even with his muffled senses, Bellamy can tell that. Octavia wasn’t wrong; he’s clearly headed for bigger and better things, than teaching high school history class.

But Bellamy  _ likes  _ teaching his high school history class. A lot better than he likes hitting strangers on a mat, no matter how nice it feels to raise his arm at the end.

Lincoln doesn’t yell at him during the second break, but it’s more of a _ I’m not mad, I’m disappointed  _ talk, while Octavia just flat-out glares. The judges aren’t looking impressed over at their glorified picnic table. Bellamy keeps letting his guard down, letting Tristan get easy hits in that should be harder for him. He can taste blood in his mouth, and he’s not quite sure when that happened. He’s suddenly positive that he’s going to lose--which is fine. The losing purse is more than enough to meet their quota, it’s just. He’d wanted so badly to  _ win  _ this one.

Clarke catches his gaze near the end of the last sixty seconds. “You can do this,” she says, and he can’t hear her over the crowd, but he knows that’s what she said. 

The bell rings, and Bellamy tries to remember the move that Lincoln pulled on him, their very first match. The one that ended with him flat on his back and completely winded. 

Octavia had been there, and she’d booed when he went down, stepping in herself to show him how it’s done, by laying out her own boyfriend, three times her size. Bellamy had been in awe of his sister, and a little bitter because she had better moves.

He waits for Tristan to throw a punch, grown lazy because he thinks it’s an easy hit. Bellamy catches his arm, pivots on his heel, and flips him.

There’s a rush of shouting from the crowd, the bell starts ringing, the referee comes to separate them, pushing Bellamy back from where Tristan lays unconscious on the mat.

He moves over towards his corner, where Lincoln and Octavia are climbing up the ropes, apparently not caring at all that they aren’t allowed to. The ref kneels over Tristan, pressing his ear to the man’s chest, and Bellamy feels like he might actually throw up.

“ _ Fuck _ ,” he says, because what else is there to say about it? “ _ Fuck _ \--did I kill him? Holy shit, I killed him.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Lincoln assures him, placing a hand on his shoulder, but Bellamy can’t look away from where Tristan is laid out, spread eagle, not moving at all.

Finally, the ref sits up, waving both arms like a giant X. “He’s alright!” he calls out, and the whole room seems to heave a breath of relief. “He’s alright!”

“ _ Fuck _ ,” Bellamy says again, because--he’s just won. His first semi-professional fight, and he’s  _ won _ .

Up in the stands, his students and coworkers erupt like a volcano, a wave of applause and shrieks of victory. Octavia lets out a whoop of her own and jumps on top of him, and Lincoln picks them both up in his arms and swings them through the air.

Once he sets them down again, Bellamy collapses, finally giving into his own exhaustion, and he lets the  _ official  _ paramedics carry him out on a stretcher, after they’ve come and gone with Tristan. Bellamy’s legs feel like jelly, and he doesn’t even want to try walking, yet.

Clarke forces her way through like she always does, because when Clarke wants to get somewhere, she gets there. She walks beside them through the building, finds Bellamy’s hand, and squeezes it tight.

Bellamy spits out his mouth guard and he knows he must be disgusting, covered in sweat and spit and blood, not all of it his, but he won and the last fight is over, and he has a promise to keep.

“When I can walk, I’m taking you out to dinner,” he says, and Clarke laughs, bright and happy.

“I’ll hold you to that,” she says, and directs the paramedics to Roan’s truck, because Bellamy flatly refuses to let them take him to a hospital.

“Unless you want to loan me the ten thousand dollars they’ll charge me for an overnight stay,” he tells them, but they look less than impressed.

“Bell, you just won the match,” Clarke reminds him. “The purse is twenty-five thousand.” But she has them drop him off at the truck anyway, because, as she put it, “He’s a stubborn idiot, so you might as well just listen to him.”

She helps him lay out in the backseat, while the crowd starts to flow out through the exit doors. He maybe should have stayed to collect his winnings, but he knows Lincoln and Octavia can handle it.

“When my mouth isn’t filled with blood, I’ll kiss you,” he says, and Clarke grins, raising his un-gloved hand to her mouth, pressing her lips against his knuckles. 

“I’ll kiss you back.”

 

Bellamy walks into school on Monday, to a thunderous applause. The hall is filled with students, a lot of them wearing their BLAKE jerseys, all of them grinning and clapping and asking what he’s going to do with the money.

“Put it in a savings account,” he says, and they boo.

In reality, he’s already given the forty-three thousand in a sealed envelope to Principal Wallace, while Cage lurked off to the side and glowered.

“Isn’t it against school policy?” he demanded, and his father made a show of thumbing through the handbook, just to see.

“Strangely, it says nothing about mixed martial arts being performed off of school property,” he said, eventually. “And of course, donations are always accepted, with thanks.”

Bellamy smirked. “You’re welcome.” He was hoping Cage’s head would explode before he left, and was a little disappointed when it didn’t.

He finds Clarke alone in the storage room, not really on purpose, since he actually did need more printing paper, but since she’s there, he shuts the door, and backs her up against the shelving.

“What about the dinner I was promised?” she teases, folding her hands around to play with the hair above his neck. Bellamy grins.

“I’m pretty sure I promised you something else too,” he murmurs, leaning in, but Clarke is the one who kisses him first, hungry and insistent, like she’s been waiting just as long, holding herself back just as much as he has.

She tastes like chapstick, and blueberry scones, and he groans when she licks into him, pulling back enough to whisper “I don’t taste any blood.”

“Yeah, I brushed my teeth first.”

“Such a gentleman,” she laughs, and he kisses her again. He might never stop kissing her.

Bellamy has his hand up her skirt, on the smooth cotton of her underwear, and Clarke’s mouth is on his neck, when Miller walks into the room.

They jump like startled teenagers caught making out--which is, he realizes, exactly what’s just  happened--and break apart, the three of them staring back and forth for a stretch of silence.

“Don’t mind me,” Miller drawls, grabbing a pack of unsharpened pencils before heading out again, pulling the door closed behind him.

“Fuck,” Bellamy laughs, ducking his head down against her shoulder. “It’s going to be all over the school within ten minutes.”

Clarke presses a kiss to his hair. “They were all bound to find out eventually, right?” 

He pulls back to look at her and finds her biting her lip, like she could somehow  _ not  _ know how much he loves her. Bellamy reaches up, and thumbs at her cheek. It still hurts when he smiles, but he can’t help it right now.

“Yeah,” he says, soft. “They would’ve.  _ Fuck _ , they would’ve known within a second, just looking at me. Clarke, I’m--”

She kisses him to cut him off, but he can’t even feel offended. “I know,” she says, licking her lips when she pulls back, like she wants to keep tasting him. “It’s the same for me.”

This time, Murphy’s the one who walks in on them, but he just rolls his eyes and walks back out without even grabbing anything.

“We should probably leave while we still have our clothes on,” Bellamy decides, stepping back so Clarke can straighten her skirt out.

“Yeah, we can rip each other’s clothes off after school hours,” she says brightly, and Bellamy isn’t sure he’ll even last the day.

He does, of course, and then they can’t even dawdle and have sex on the cot in her office like he wants to, because Lexa’s their ride home.

“Have you heard the news?” she asks, when they reach her car in the parking lot. Lexa always parks far away from everyone else, because she is first and foremost an elitist. 

“Look,” Bellamy starts with a sigh, “we weren’t thinking, and things got a little heated, but it’s not like we actually had sex, or--”

Lexa cuts him off with a look of very deep disdain. Even in her bright orange BLAKE jersey, she manages to look like she is fundamentally  _ better  _ than him. “What,” she says, not even a question, because she doesn’t  _ actually _ want to know.

“So it is true,” Roan barks out a laugh. “Nathan said he caught you hooking up in the storage room, I wasn’t sure if I should believe him.”

“We didn’t  _ hook up _ ,” Clarke snaps, going bright red, and Bellamy grins when she tucks herself into him, embarrassed.

“Yes, well, I wasn’t referring to that,” Lexa says stiffly. She’s always uncomfortable with public displays of affection, even though Bellamy knows for a fact that she is a very cuddly drunk. “I was referring to the news of your status as the semi-professional middleweight champion.”

“Oh,” Bellamy says, slipping into the backseat with his girlfriend--because he can call her that now, and he plans to do so until the novelty wears off. “No, what news?”

“Apparently they’re calling you Slingshot,” Roan tells him, twisting around in the front seat, so he can show them his phone. There’s a picture of Bellamy on some official MMA amateur league website, with NEW GOLDEN BOY: BELLAMY “SLINGSHOT” BLAKE in some boxing-movie-type script, at the bottom. Lincoln must be pleased. “After your signature move from Saturday.”

“I can’t believe you’re retiring from the ring at thirty-two,” Clarke teases, and Bellamy presses a grin to her hair. “You finally got a nickname!”

“’Watch how the Slingshot took down Goliath,’” Roan reads aloud, and Lexa threatens to cut out his tongue and make him eat it, if he ever refers to Bellamy as that again.

“He’s not a martial artist,” she says, stubborn. “He’s a history teacher.”

“This article says otherwise,” Roan argues, but Bellamy interrupts them both.

“No, Lexa’s right, I’m a teacher,” he says, and Lexa sits smug behind the wheel for the rest of the drive home. 

Clarke snuggles into Bellamy’s side, because there’s no real point in not doing it, since everyone already knows. He’s pretty sure they’re going to be one of those infuriating couples who are always touching each other. If he asked any of their friends, they’d probably say they were already one of those infuriating couples, except worse because they weren’t even dating.

“Are you sure you won’t miss it? The MMA life?” she asks, and Bellamy hums, considering.

He thinks about what it felt like when he landed a clean hit, when he had his arm raised in the air, when he heard the crowd calling his name, chanting it like a prayer.

“Nah,” he decides. “It was fun for a while, but I like this life better.”


End file.
